Oh, fuck me with a chainsaw
The fall rains have come in, and despite being on massive antidepressants I’m starting to slide right back into the black depression I was in this spring. I guess it’s time to throw myself into as much distance riding as I can wedge in over the next few days to try and kick myself out of it.
4×Estacada 100 this week, maybe, or switch between the Estacada 100 and Kevin’s Sauvie Island 110?
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Well, it’s possible my vegan diet might have something to do with it, but I’ve been moderately fussy about maintaining a varied diet. I’ll try vitamin D supplements (I already have a bottle of vitamin B-12 lying around in case the soymilk in my diet doesn’t provide enough of it) but I suspect that most of it is because the aftereffects of the spring catastrophe have put me close enough to the edge so even the slightest thing has nasty spiralling side-effects. So shitty fall weather == dark gloom + not so much bike riding == extra depression.
So I’ll see if riding a 100 every day for the rest of the week punches me up out of the gloom.
(Another thing is maybe disappointed vanity; the complete and utter lack of commentary when I mentioned that I’d rolled over 10k/10k miles/RUSA km has been somewhat disappointing. Some of it is an artifact that I’m not on Facebook, where every bikey person I know is and where all of the rando rides and events are planned, but, goddamn, I’ve put in 2000 more RUSA km than any other RUSA member in Oregon this year and it’s not even november yet.)
And, also, about the only time I don’t feel like I want to either curl up in a sobbing ball or just slit my wrists and be done with the whole fucking world is when I’m on the bicycle. If I push myself fast enough, I’m too tired to think about the spring catastrophes (one of which was possibly the third worst thing that could happen to me, with the first being losing Julie and the second being losing the bears) and if I have the iphone pumping music into my ears, it at least directs my thoughts instead of having them just settle aimlessly on my soul and tear into it.
It sucks to be me.
It’s not variety in the diet so much as it’s the amount (and composition; paper came out of Spain recently linking trans-fats to depression…) of fat in your diet.
http://www.depressiontoolkit.org/news/fat_and_depression_connection.asp is a pretty good summary.
If your percent body fat is dropping and you’re exercising in the cold, that’s one of those inherently stressful things. Your metabolism doesn’t know you’re not at risk of starving, so it can have remarkably big side effects, rather like chronic pain. If you’re getting both of those, that’s a big deal.
Oh, and 10k is an order of magnitude more than I’ve cycled this year; didn’t figure I had the standing to comment!
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One of the things that helped me a whole lot – aside from figuring out that, hey, there are these things I cannot eat, I can stop poisoning myself – with depression was getting more complex grease in my diet.
I figure there’s a connection with brains being made out of the stuff, but haven’t got any SCIENCE! to back this up, just an anecdotal data point that getting flax seed oil, evening primrose oil, and (useless to you) cod liver oil into the supplement stack Really Helped. (Also cooking with good olive oil.)
What you’re reporting about being extra-fit, and being surprised by how cold you have been getting, makes me wonder if your fat metabolism might be in a local net deficit. (Really easy to do when exercising hard on a vegan diet. And sometimes you want that, but maybe not while being rained on in the winter…)
The other thing I found out because every GP in Ontario started asking if one was supplementing vitamin D, as well as calcium. (Socialized medicine = big push to avoid joint replacement surgery, hence trying to get everyone to take extra calcium.)
The D is a little more interesting; it’s vital for all kinds of metabolism stuff, including the brain bits that go wrong for people with SAD, and we mostly stop making it, no matter how much sun we get, when we hit forty or so. And the folks looking into why D was so important it would de-melaninate populations doing some equivalent of living on oats in the rain found that out. Also that a diet high in Fertile Crescent grains rips the stuff out of you to support digestive processes.
Taking D is pretty slow; a couple-three months to show obvious results. But it has been making a big huge difference to how I deal with winter.
So, hey, it might help, and I thought I’d mention.